Charter for Working Group

The OSI upper-layer protocols (above transport) are rich in functionand specified in large, complex and numerous documents. However, insupporting a particular application, the protocol actually used is onlya subset of the whole. An implementation is not required to supportfeatures it never uses, and it is, or should be, possible to haverelatively lightweight implementations specialized for a particularapplication or group of applications with similar requirements. Theapplication protocol could be an OSI application layer standard or aprotocol originally defined for TCP/IP or other environment. It will beeasier to produce such implementations if the necessary protocol isdescribed concisely in a single document.

An implementation, of the mapping of X Window System protocol over OSI upper-layers, is based on this principle.

The working group is chartered to produce two documents:

``Skinny bits for byte-stream'': a specification of the bitsequences that implement the OSI upper-layer protocols (session,presentation and ACSE) as needed to support an application thatrequires simple connection, and byte-stream read and write. This willbe based on the octet sequences needed to support X. This will not beexpected to be provide a full equivalent of TCP, nor to cover specificstandardized protocols.

``Skinny bits for Directory'': a specification of the bit sequencesneeded for the Directory Access Protocol - in the same style as thebyte-stream specification, but to include DAP. The level of functionality of this is to be determined.

An important aspect of the group's work is to find out if it is possibleto produce useful and concise specifications of this kind. A minor partis to think of better names.

The group will also encourage the deployment of X/OSI implementationsand interworking experiments with it.

Milestones

Date

Milestone

Mar 1994

Submit the ``Skinny Bits for Directory'' specification to the IESG for consideration as a Proposed Standard.

Dec 1993

Submit the ``Skinny Bits for Byte-Stream'' specification to the IESG for consideration as a Proposed Standard.